HOW WAS I TO KNOW?

“How was I to know that what I am you didn’t want me to be?”

I have no recollection of what play that line is from. I heard it when I was between eighteen and nineteen years of age, in a small Illinois theater. I recall little else about the play itself. And yet my entire body remembers vividly the feeling that occurred as I heard an actor utter that line.

“How was I to know that what I am you didn’t want me to be?”

Those words reactivated an internal trauma it would take decades to even begin to integrate.

We knew little about the dynamics of inutero imprinting or of birth trauma when that declaration first landed with a thud in my inner being. Science has now discovered and proven that our emotional bodies begin being primally imprinted about three months after conception. Everything that happens around and within our mothers has an energetic impact on our developing self. We literally float and are fed by the energies happening in the womb. This is one of the drawbacks to traditional psychotherapy. Most of the wounding that occurs for us is while we are precognitive beings. Trying to think and talk our way out of our pain is minimally effective. At some point we need to drop into the very emotional pain we spend our lifetimes trying to avoid. Endlessly talking about the story mostly just keeps us in an ever-looping story.

Until one day an idea or a statement startles us and triggers the inutero trauma we are being called to stay with, feel through, and integrate.

How was I to know that what I am you didn’t want me to be?

The mentality of those words pointed to the emotional trauma that had been holding me just below the surface. Drowning me. Suffocating me. Killing me ever so slowly yet with ever-increasing intensity.

The grief was devastating. I am certain that is why I cannot recall the name of the play or the exact location of the theater. I felt as if I had been hit in the chest by a ball bat.

It didn’t take me long to begin to master ways of deadening the pain of that re-traumatization. Overthinking, avoidance, recoil, addiction, and withhold served me well.

Until they didn’t.

And so, much of my personal spiritual awakening has been about dealing with and integrating the grief that gripped my heart and stifled my expression. The felt-sense imprinted grief that made me believe that what I am the world at large and the people of my direct sphere didn’t want me to be. This attractor was mirrored and experienced in my family, my schooling, my religion, and my relationships.

And it was most evident in my own inner atmosphere.

How could I have known that what I am I didn’t want me to be?

I am beyond grateful to report that I have successfully dedicated myself to dealing directly with this trauma and its myriad effects. I remain watchful for when it is activated. I no longer allow myself to become snagged or entrapped by ongoing resentment, projection, or blame. That does not mean I live in self-diminishment and fault, taking on the pain others cast my way. I stay awake to the fact that it is my trauma and grief that draws and attracts experiences to aid me in my integration. And the more I heal the stronger my boundaries and self-referral become. I am clear that we are all wounded in relationship, and we heal in relationship. We are all imperfect in our ways of relating. It is a painful and unfortunate effect of our imprinting.

And so, I take responsibility for how I may inadvertently hurt others. I become clearer and clearer about how I may declare and deliver that same devastating declaration to others:” what you are I don’t want you to be.” I own and I compassion where that comes from, and I choose as quickly as possible to apologize and amend my behavior.

And on rare occasions I take that same ball bat to my chest. It is a cost of my shared humanity.

When I slip up and my imperfection comes forth, I can be and am still rejected and, in not the same words, be told “what you are I don’t want you to be.”

The impact is not the same. It is not as devastating or as long lasting. For now, I know that what I am I accept myself as being. The grief that gripped my heart and dammed my expression has been lessened by the internal work that I have done. The once traumatizing effects of my familial, educational, religious, and relational programming grows thinner and less commanding with every passing year. Every prayer, every meditation, every authentic relationship, and my own staying presence has largely set me free.

And so, moment by moment, I choose to reopen. I choose to allow myself to risk exposure. I choose to drop the instinctual defenses. I now know, based on my years of experience, that I can survive any pain. Sustain any loss. Endure any rejection. Self-refer through any others projections and fear-based scripting about me.

I am liberated enough to ask with clarity and calmness “how was I to know that what I am you didn’t want me to be?”

And then in that liberating clarity and calm I move on, certain that what I am I was surely meant to be.

TIRED OF THE SELF

It seems to me that there are those who never tire of telling self-diminishing stories about themselves, and then blaming others for the effects those stories generate.

Please feel free to delete and/or to unsubscribe at any point. I just feel compelled to say this, and to say it now.

It is common in our culture to deal with issues surrounding self-esteem. Most if not all of us have or continue to struggle with a wounded sense of self. I personally believe these challenges are integral to our spiritual evolution. We are meant to grow from a false to a truer self-image. The false sense of self is emotionally originated and is then perpetuated by the mental stories we tell from this wounding and fragility.

This emotional wounding-story telling creates most of our suffering here in this human condition. It is causal, thus attracting circumstances and situations which match the vibrations and the stories we are emitting and weaving. The subsequent suffering continues until it becomes so intense that we begin to more closely examine the role that we are playing in the dramas. As we deal directly with our part, and what we are projecting forth, our sense of self begins to change. In short, we become willing forgive and to tell a better tale. We reparent and attend to the woundedness. We stop blaming others and outer effects for the pain we have experienced.

We stop blaming others and outer effects for the pain we have experienced.

And now back to my original premise we go.

There are those who never tire of telling self-diminishing stories about themselves, and then blaming others for the effects those stories generate.

Someone had to tell you. It might as well be someone who was masterful at it for decades.

I suffered so severely from my self-stories that one day my suffering began to awaken me. It began to dawn on my that I was the one telling the maligning tales about myself. I was the one perpetuating the painful stories. I was the one choosing the diminishing meanings to what was occurring. To how people were treating me. My sense of self and my subsequent experience was totally up for sale to the nearest bidder. Having no clear sense of who I was, outside of the faulty and fearful self, I was constantly tossed about by the opinions and the projections of others.

I emitted the painful energy. I told the demeaning tale. And others were continually attracted that would mirror for me what I unconsciously thought of myself. And then I made them wrong. I blamed them for my hurt. I denounced them for not treating me like I wanted to be treated. Disowning the fact that they were treating me exactly as I was treating myself.

I was the common denominator and I couldn’t see it.

Until I could. Until I did.

It is at this point that the author tells you that when he saw that he was telling the painful stories he stopped doing it and has been living in an affirmative glow ever since.

No.

What this author is going to tell you is that after the suffering began to awaken me and I began to own what I was doing to myself I have never again been totally kidnapped by the dynamic. I never completely forget that I am a living participation in the human drama, and that everything that happens to me is happening through me. I am constantly applying meaning to what is happening. I am continually offered the opportunity to decide how I show up internally, and so in relationship. While our interactions influence my energy field, I refuse to play victim or to blame you for how I am feeling. I am responsible for my self-regulation. I am responsible for how I respond to the mirroring that is occurring. I am responsible for the energy I put firth, regardless of what story you may be telling.

I am free to a large degree of the self-diminishing stories I used to demean myself with. This freedom makes me particularly sensitive to those who are still caught in the dynamic. Daily I am privy to people I care deeply about still entrenched in what amounts to delusional stories of how life is treating them. I ache as I watch. I want to help. I want to alleviate the suffering.

And I know I can’t.

I have tried. I have employed various strategies to interrupt the stories. I have bent over backwards to acknowledge and to affirm these prisoners of their own reality. And I have found that no matter how hard I have tried it is never enough.

It will never be enough.

So, I have found that the greatest gift I can give is to continue to do my own inner work. To continue to pray into my deepest Self, and to surround these storytellers with as much Light as possible. I refuse to buy into or to collude with the stories. I do not let myself get hooked. This means I do not go into reactivity when I am a character in the story. I also work with my own frustration that there are those who either can’t or won’t stop the self-abuse. Or the blame. Or the story-identification.

It ultimately is such wasted energy. Until I dealt directly with what I was doing to myself I could not effectively serve humanity. I was too trapped in myself. To caught in my own web. I was my own false god and so, even though I wanted to, I couldn’t serve the True One.

Self-stories are blasphemy. Tormenting tales are the height of arrogance. We are beings of Source and we are here to shine. Dimming our own Light serves no one.

If anything here rings true for you I pray you will take this to heart. That you will stop and look at your own suffering. That you will begin to peel away the blame and own what you have been transmitting and projecting. That you will self-interrupt your demeaning stories and see the effects for the mirroring that they are.

I pray that you will tire of the self. Tire of the self-induced suffering. Tire of the blame and disempowerment.

Forgive yourself, yourself. Tell a better story. Emit a Lighter energy. And then watch what begins to come your way.

APPROVAL SEEKING

Being born to a highly critical mother left me spending much of my life seeking approval or at least acceptance.

I am long past blaming my mother. I knew my grandmother, and so I know from whence the judging consciousness came from. My mother spent her entire life seeking approval from a woman who was not capable of giving it. This continued long after my grandmother’s death. I lived and experienced this long enough to see that my mothers torment was of her own making.

I vowed that I would not make the same mistake.

While my pattern was particularly geared toward gaining the attention and affection of men the mother dynamic is to this day alive and active. The differential that keeps me from torment is that I know and can relate to the dynamic. As long as I can relate to it, it does not fully have me.

I know well the feeling that approval-seeking has in my body. I am well acquainted with the stories that spin in my head when I perceive that I am being somehow maligned. I know the compensating behaviors that I am tempted to employ. And I am intimate with the suffering that ensues when I fall into any of these traps.

There is a scrutinizing tyrant that has a seat in my consciousness. It is always ready to point out my mistakes, my imperfections, my faulty way of being. It is constantly scrutinizing and evaluating. It sees me as never enough. It usually will speak first and speak loudest.

What it cannot do is stop me from speaking back.

I erroneously thought that the healing of this “mom-torture” would be that it would go away. That I would be forever freed of it. That it would die and be replaced by a fount of all affirmative self-talk. That the mother approval I had always longed for would come gushing up from within and all around.

Wrong.

My latest report to self is that the voice is still speaking. The temptation to approval-seek is still active. The need to be accepted is at least to some degree ever-present.

Rather than being rid of these impulses there is simply more awareness around them. I am not free of, but I am free with. I have an experience of these dynamics; the dynamics do not have me.

As soon as I feel the effect of these voices in my body, I bring my attention to the energy and stay as present as I possibly can. I begin to relate to the energy and to the voices. I accept that they are there. I approve of the way I am staying awake and relating to.

Wait.

I accept the energy that is moving within me and I approve of the way I am relating to it.

Being born to a highly critical mother left me spending much of my life seeking approval or at least acceptance.

And now I have it.

Not hers. That ship has sailed.

I have my own acceptance and approval. And that is a gift no one can take away.

WHERE I BELONG

While I grew up in the Midwest I never really felt like I belonged there.

I could write volumes as to why that might be. Ultimately it really doesn’t matter. From early in adolescents I always knew I would leave my native Ohio and only occasionally look back. I longed for what I perceived to be life in the big city. A big part of that longing was career aspiration. I wanted to go to New York City and leave my mark on the Great White Way. I was going to sing and dance on Broadway, and then make my way into the film versions of the same shows. I would have a huge mantle to hold all of my awards. In the privacy of my bedroom I practiced my acceptance speeches and bowed and smiled for the imaginary cameras. I was a legend in my own mind.

I embodied at least a part of those dreams. I did indeed move to New York City. I had a modicum of success in the entertainment industry. I never won an award and so never gave a speech. I spent a fair amount of time on camera, but always in the background to a celebrity’s foreground. And yet I felt like I belonged there. I felt like I had landed exactly where I was meant to be.

I had.

Just not for the reason I thought.

I had just enough talent to get me to where something different and ever more important was meant to happen in and for me. While I thought New York would hold and offer me the keys to this most fabulous city the key it held was a radically different way of being that was far transcendent to any role I would ever play.

While in terms of career success I never truly belonged in New York I learned in New York how to belong within myself. I began to learn that belonging is an internal choice that is integral to our spiritual awakening. While I never could have imagined leaving NYC circumstances did indeed bid me to say farewell. Twenty-four years ago I was moved to a place I never wanted to live and never thought I would belong. For what I perceived at the time was only for the love of another I moved to south Florida where I have been ever since. There is still a part of me that feels like I don’t and never will belong here.

That is true at only the surface level.

At a deeper level that sense of not belonging has been a context for a deepening and a ripening of what I am to become. I have chosen to place preference behind purpose. I have decided repeatedly that service and being the way is more important than geography and getting my way. I decide daily that I belong where I say I belong. And deciding on where I belong is intimately linked to why I am where I am.

And so just as the Broadway community never invited me into their circle of belonging, I have been cast out of other circles both in and out of Florida. Just as I have been cast out I have often made the choice that there are clubs and cliques in which I do not by virtue of values want to belong.

There are groups who demand compliance and fitting in as requisites of belonging.

No, thank you.

Fitting in is not belonging. I have never been clearer about that.

Belonging requires clear, firm, and unbreakable boundaries. Those I have developed in Florida. Belonging requires a strong and unmovable sense of self. Again; thank you Florida. It demands clear priorities. Check. It builds and solidifies discernment and the ability to respond from a place of autonomy and strength. You don’t get that on stage.

I grew up in the Midwest and I really don’t belong there.

I was reborn in New York City, and I no longer belong there either.

I am a longtime resident of south Florida and I rise daily to choose to belong here.

I belong here not because of climate or longevity or preference or familiarity.

I belong here simply because I am here. I belong here because I belong in here. And so wherever I am I belong.

Wherever I am I choose my sense of belonging. No awards, bright lights, or big cities needed.

Being where I do not prefer to be is what taught me where I truly belong.

Right in here.

THE BIO OF A BIOPSY

Here we go again.

The glare of the fluorescent light was softened only slightly by the hint of sun glinting through the small window. The same mass-produced village scape hung slightly crooked on the wall. The same unimaginably uncomfortable chairs. The same computer. The canned music seemed louder than before.

The music seemed so much louder than before.

Here we go again. And yet not. In the mere months following open heart surgery there was now evidence that cancer may be coming to teach its revolutionary curriculum once again.

And yet not. Not again. Not a repeat. Though it is the very same room lit by the same fluorescent light with the same sterile décor that six years ago I heard the words “it’s cancer” there is only “again” at the conceptual level. It is only again as a most scary thought within my mind. It is only again in the sinking way fear says, “you survived it once but maybe not this time.”

Biopsy. Six simple alphabet letters that form together to cause an alchemizing explosion in the human energy system. Biopsy contains within it the prefix bio, which literally translates to “life.” Tissue sample is collected, often in radical and invasive ways, and then the outcome is a prophesy as to whether or not life will continue or terminate. For me the suggestion and then the reality of a biopsy sets forth a dynamic that is indeed revolutionary in its scope.

Here we go again.

And yet it is different. The date is set and with it the dynamic. The life stream of the impending procedure is far from here we go again. It is new. It is deeper. It contains and includes the commentary surrounding potential outcomes. There is a narrative around what choices will be available and made should the outcome point in a direction of unsustainable disease. Unsustainable life. The potential of fighting for life. Bio-warfare. Extreme measures. Hanging on to hanging on. How much time? How much bio? How much life?

This cannot be happening again.

Indeed, it is not. It is the same doctor but a different procedure. The same surgery center but a very different patient. The same potential, but a decidedly different relationship.

And so, the biopsy is completed. And the waiting begins.

Or the waiting continues. The waiting began the day the suggestion was made. Every stone of potential outcome has been overturned and explored. Every scenario has been played to the imaginary end. Logic and reason have been turned inside out, as has suppression and denial. Intuition seems to be the one avenue blocked and currently unavailable.

It is probably that damn fluorescent light. That ghastly canned music. The suddenly annoying ticking of my husbands watch.

Just as the temptation to straighten that hideous village scape was driving me out of the tormenting chair and onto my suddenly wobbling feet the door opened.

Here we go again?

The familiar and smiling face of the physician’s assistant put in end to the waiting before he said a thing. They don’t send PA’s in to deliver bio-threatening news.

And so, the prognosis is ongoing bio. Continuing life. Come back in a year and be well until. And the curriculum is complete.

Is it?

My life is undoubtably more because of my dance with here we go again. My bio-relating is expanded by the dynamic of biopsy. The relating and the waiting. The awareness of where my commentary can lead me. What roads my narrative is drawn to take. What outcomes my habitual attention prophesies. What measures I might take to ensure the great bio continues to express as me.

I am a decades long meditator, and a life-long prayer. My spiritual practices have grown and evolved and changed throughout the years. One of the most prolific and unpredictable of them all is biopsy. The first, and the once again. The invasiveness, and the intimacy. The waiting. That fertile and unforgiving waiting. The bio and the potential ceasing of bio.

Biopsy has taught me much about bio. Bio and has led me further and deeper into itself via biopsy. Via waiting. Through and out of here we go again. Invasion and introspection. Virtual living and potential dying. Endless inquiries and revelatory questioning.

Different outcome. Same me. Yet something has definitely changed. Something closed has opened. Something asleep has awakened. Something startled has settled.

Biopsy has led to more bio-life within and as me. So here we go again.